Just to keep this blog alive over the summer, I’ll update with what I’ve been doing here in Kansas… and add some music (favourites are 1, 4, 7, and 8).

I’ve been back for just about a week now.  Driving back from the airport, I got to see my first Kansas thunderstorm in nearly a year.  Geographically, Kansas is located in the cross-hairs.  We get hot winds up from the Gulf of Mexico and cool winds down from the Great Lakes and Canada, add those two together and you get the infamous rolling prairie thunderstorms and tornados!!!

Speaking of the weather… it’s been hot.  Dreadfully hot.   Today the temperature was 40C.  Kansas weather is just crazy, the summers are sweltering and in the winter it can get to -10C easy.

But, the Kansas countryside is pretty cute. It’s nice not living right in the middle of a city again.  It’s super quiet out here.

I’ve gone into Lawrence over the past week and went to some of my favourite places (coffee shops, bookstores, etc).  I’ve been reading some books as well.  During term I did not have much time to just read for fun, I was reading a lot of academic papers for essays and classes.

Currently, I’m reading The Secret History by Donna Tartt a novel about a group of Classics students at a small liberal arts university who murder one of their classmates.  The book is well written and takes the classic ‘murder mystery’ and inverts it into not a ‘whodunit?’ but a ‘whydunit?.’ The characters are all morally grey and while you’re cheering for them… you’re not really. The novel opens with the protagonist confessing to the murder.

I also just started reading The White Queen by Philippa Gregory.  The novel is about Elizabeth Woodville, Queen Consort of the Yorkist King Edward IV, set during the height of the War of the Roses in the 15c.  I’m nearly finished watching the Starz/BBC television adaptation (which is really good and quite accurate) so I decided to read the book.  And as it turns out, Philippa Gregory got her phD in 18c literature from Edinburgh!

Besides catching up on reading, I’ve got to write my excavation report for Romania to turn into the school in September.  I’m also hoping to stab more into my current manuscript.  I have a bad habit of working on a manuscript and then getting bored with it.  I’ve got at least three with 50,000+ words that have been abandoned to the manuscript graveyard. #yikes.

So that’s been my week back in Kansas.  Figured I’d keep the blog alive over the summer, because I do genuinely like writing it.